Special issue on: "advances in production line systems

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Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management

ISSN: 1741-038X

Article publication date: 8 March 2013

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Citation

Shaaban, S. and Hudson, S. (2013), "Special issue on: "advances in production line systems", Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Vol. 24 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmtm.2013.06824caa.001

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Special issue on: "advances in production line systems"

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, Volume 24, Issue 3

About the Guest Editors

Sabry ShaabanReceived his PhD in Management Science from Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and MSc in Operational Research from the University of Sussex (UK). He served as an Associate Professor at ESC Rennes (France) for the period 1999-2010. He is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Finance at ESC La Rochelle (France), where he teaches courses in operations management and business statistics. He taught as a Visiting Professor at Thunderbird Europe, Temple University (USA), and other business schools overseas. His research interests include studying the performance of a wide variety of production lines.

Sarah HudsonResearcher and Assistant Professor at the ESC Rennes School of Business. She completed her PhD in the field of Liquid Crystals and went on to work at the University of Sevilla, Spain in the development of catalysts. She now teaches statistical analysis and research methods at ESC Rennes. Her research interests are in the field of sustainable development, technology and production science. She is the co-author of several articles in the area of production line efficiency.

Introduction

The contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management dedicated to “advances in production line systems” encompass a rich variety of papers which testify to the continuing and lively interest of researchers all over the world in pondering how best to improve production systems. Companies spend billions of dollars annually on the design, installation, operation, and maintenance of production lines, and the role of research in aiding managers in these decisions is paramount. The depth and scope of the different approaches to advancing the field are reflected in the results presented and the discussions provided which form the content of the contributions in this issue.

Three of the papers deal with Pull/JIT or Kanban systems. Gonzalez, Framinan and Ruiz-Usano provide us with a an iterative optimization/simulation methodology for designing pull systems in their paper “A methodology for the design and operation of pull-based supply chains”, and Olaitan and Geraghty shed light on how different design strategies were evaluated in accordance with a manufacturer’s strategic specifications in their article “Evaluation of production control strategies for negligible-setup, multi-product, serial lines with consideration for robustness”. Zhang derives formulae for the performance of such systems in his paper “Kanban-controlled exponential production lines: analysis and design”.

Another aspect dealt with in three of the articles is that of line balancing and sequencing. Biswal, Deepak and Rao in their study entitled “Optimization of robotic assembly sequences using immune based technique” develop an artificial immune system to generate a feasible, stable and optimal robot assembly sequence with a minimum assembly cost. Cohen develops a framework for assessing the effect of line segmentation on performance in his contribution “Assembly line segmentation: determining the number of stations per section”. Kalayci and Gupta use an ant colony optimization approach to investigate the design and balancing of automated disassembly lines outlined in their paper “Ant colony optimization for sequence dependent disassembly line balancing problem”.

Other papers look at the issue of unbalanced unpaced production lines suffering breakdown (Shaaban, McNamara and Hudson, “The effects of unbalancing operation time variability on the performance of unreliable lines”). Sharma investigates how to reduce cycle time in his paper “Cycle time reduction in context to the make to order (MTO) environment”; and Chan, Chung and Lim discuss lot-scheduling problems in their contribution “Recent research trend of economic-lot scheduling problems”.

The opportunity to create this special issue has been a rich and exciting experience with a steep learning curve. Many thanks must go to the authors of the papers whose patience and determination to provide their best efforts have led to the great variety and quality of this issue. We would also like to express our gratitude to the many reviewers (both of these papers and those that did not make it) whose sterling work provided great help and support to the authors in the improvement of their papers. Finally, a heartfelt thank-you has to go to David Bennett, Editor of JMTM whose immediate kind and informative response to our every query greatly encouraged and helped us over the many months taken to put this issue together.

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of the Special issue on Advances in Production Line Systems guest edited by Dr Sabry Shaaban and Dr Sarah Hudson.

Sabry Shaaban, Sarah HudsonGuest Editors

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